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n the Percy Jackson books, misunderstood children find out they are modern-day mythological heroes. Interest in Camp Half-Blood has been growing, perhaps because a Percy Jackson movie was released this year, or because the series features its own Camp Half-Blood, where Percy and other middle school demigods find refuge.

An independent bookstore in Austin, Tex., held the first Camp Half-Blood in 2006. The store, BookPeople, had been hosting dramatic readings of manuscripts in the series, and one day Topher Bradfield, the children’s activity coordinator, said to his young listeners, “Wouldn’t it be great if Camp Half-Blood was a real place?”

“The kids,” Mr. Bradfield recalled, “looked at me as if I’d sprouted a second head, and were like: ‘Yeah, duh. Of course!’ ”

The day camp, which is held in a state park, attracts children from as far away as Brazil and Britain, who stay with their parents in nearby hotels. This year, the camp’s 450 spots sold out in an hour and a half, Mr. Bradfield said.

The camps run by bookstores, which are also in Decatur, Ga., and now in Brooklyn, are not fancy affairs. A casual observer of the various Camp Half-Bloods would see a few decorations and children in matching camp T-shirts jousting with foam swords or javelins. Gods, oracles and monsters are played by actors, counselors or volunteers.

I know a lot of writers, both published and not, and so I know that for every book that makes it to stores, several are never published, and several more are never finished. Many of my friends and acquaintances from graduate school published right away, but most still haven't. No doubt some will publish in the coming years. And some have gone into social work or law or medicine and seem to have left fiction writing behind, happily, like an old hairstyle.

And what about the rest of them? These are the people—many of whom write beautifully—I wonder about. And I wonder about strangers in similar situations, artists of all ilks. I wonder if they wake in the night, their hearts racing, unable to feel anything but the fear and frustration and disappointment of the fact that they haven't finished anything in a month. I wonder if they're anything like me. My guess is that many of them are—and naturally I feel tremendous empathy. Having been there, I know there are no magic words of encouragement, no surefire tough-love tactic. I wish there were.

When I ask people to describe their writing process, what often surfaces is the idea that writing is what happens AFTER they have read everything there is to read, clearly and thoroughly worked out an idea in their heads, and have large blocks of time to empty the fully-developed idea onto the page (or into the computer). In other words, “writing” is simply the physical act a scholar engages in after she’s gotten everything figured out internally. Hand-in-hand with this exclusively mechanical understanding of writing is the sense that particular emotional states are a prerequisite for writing. In other words, people frequently tell me they need to FEEL _________ (inspired, excited, energized, confident, clear, etc.) before they can sit down and write. As you can imagine, people who need to feel perfectly inspired and have a fully formed article in their head before sitting down at their desk rarely write.

A journalist who writes about technology and society is going to spend much of his waking time basting in the electronic juices of the Internet. Maybe American teens do text too much, but not everyone is a tech jockey who lines up at the Apple store for the latest Steve Jobs dream gadget. What about the guy who drives a delivery truck, the lady who sells you stamps at the post office, the mechanic, the farmer, the factory-floor worker, the insurance salesman, the homeless guy at the local public library? They may have computer access, but they are not all leading lives bathed in the glow of an iPad or a BlackBerry. And there are office workers who still read books -- just look around you on the Metro.

Beyond the borders of the developed world, cell phones may now be more or less ubiquitous, but Internet access is not -- at least not yet. So when Carr talks about a new modern brain whose neural landscape is being dramatically reshaped by all our time online, he's not really talking about all or even most of humanity but about a relatively elite segment of the planet's population.

All evidence suggests that many more people are reading, writing and crucially responding to each other a lot more since the advent of the Internet. That said, it’s possible that the impacts Carr is talking about may be more visible on some portions of the population –especially kids– who may end up spending a lot more hours consuming video and gaming on the Internet, especially if parents let children have their own unmonitored use of computer (similar to allowing a TV in a child’s bedroom).  I think the real story might be a bimodal distribution in which some people benefit greatly from the riches of engaged conversation while others find themselves subject to even more passive consumption in the mode of television, since, surely, the Internet also delivers that experience. However, there isn’t that much of that discussion in the book and more examples of people like him who I think are, frankly, the wrong target for this concern.  

A new idea or unfamiliar fact will provoke a reflex to do something: to research the term, to query your screen “friends” for their opinions, to find alternative views, to create a bookmark, to interact with or tweet the thing rather than simply contemplate it. Book reading strengthened our analytical skills, encouraging us to pursue an observation all the way down to the footnote. Screen reading encourages rapid pattern-making, associating this idea with another, equipping us to deal with the thousands of new thoughts expressed every day. The screen rewards, and nurtures, thinking in real time. We review a movie while we watch it, we come up with an obscure fact in the middle of an argument, we read the owner’s manual of a gadget we spy in a store before we purchase it rather than after we get home and discover that it can’t do what we need it to do.

There's a very straightforward reason, says Amanda Lenhart, a Pew senior research specialist. "Simply, these technologies meet teens' developmental needs," she says. "Mobile phones and social networking sites make the things teens have always done – defining their own identity, establishing themselves as independent of their parents, looking cool, impressing members of the opposite sex – a whole lot easier."

Flirting, boasting, gossiping, teasing, hanging out, confessing: all that classic teen stuff has always happened, Lenhart says. It's just that it used to happen behind the bike sheds, or via tightly folded notes pressed urgently into sweating hands in the corridor between lessons. Social networking sites and mobile phones have simply facilitated the whole business

For grammarians, it’s a dependent clause + colon + just about anything, incorporating any and all elements of the other four colons, yet differing crucially in that its pre-colon segment is always a dependent clause.

(Yikes.)

For everyone else: its usefulness lies in that it lifts you up and into a sentence you never thought you’d be reading by giving you a compact little nugget of information prior to the colon and leaving you on the hook for whatever comes thereafter, often rambling on until the reader has exhausted his/her theoretical lung capacity and can continue to read no longer.

(Breathe.)

See how fast that goes? The jumper colon is a paragraphical Red Bull, a rocket-launch of a punctuator, the Usain Bolt of literature. It’s punchy as hell. To believers of short first sentences–Hemingway?–it couldn’t get any better. To believers of long-winded sentences that leave you gasping and slightly confused–Faulkner?–it also couldn’t get any better. By itself this colon is neither a period nor a non-period… or rather it is a period and it is also a non-period. You choose.

The assumption that today’s student are computer-literate because they are “digital natives” is a pernicious one, Zvacek said. “Our students are task-specific tech savvy: they know how to do many things,” she said. “What we need is for them to be tech-skeptical.”

Zvacek was careful to make clear that by tech-skeptical, she did not mean tech-negative. The skepticism she advocates is not a knee-jerk aversion to new technology tools, but rather the critical capacity to glean the implications, and limitations, of technologies as they emerge and become woven into the students’ lives. In a campus environment, that means knowing why not to trust Google to turn up the best sources for a research paper in its top returns, or appreciating the implications of surrendering personal data -- including the propensities of one’s bladder -- to third parties on the Web.

The Pritchard axiom — that repetitive cheating undermines learning — has ominous implications for a world in which even junior high school students cut and paste from the Internet instead of producing their own writing.

If we look closely at plagiarism as practiced by youngsters, we can see that they have a different relationship to the printed word than did the generations before them. When many young people think of writing, they don’t think of fashioning original sentences into a sustained thought. They think of making something like a collage of found passages and ideas from the Internet.

They become like rap musicians who construct what they describe as new works by “sampling” (which is to say, cutting and pasting) beats and refrains from the works of others.

This comparison to rap musicians doesn't read right to me. The demands of sampling require a certain knowledge and awareness. To extend the idea that students aren't learning when they cheat to how many successful rap artists make a living reveals a lack of understanding. Such a view is overly simplistic and the definition of "learning" might be too narrow.

In my first-year and advanced composition courses, I have an assignment, "Mashup Scholarship," that asks students to put together a minimum of five sources using none of their own words. They have to use the transitions provided in the sources they've chosen. They read Lethem's "The ecstasy of influence" and watch Youtube videos for modeling purposes. They come up with alternative citation methods, from color-coding to ISBN to something else that only makes sense to them. In reflective writing about this assignment, students often name "Mashup Scholarship" among the hardest composing they've completed.